Sponsors (6)
The bill increases transparency and accountability of officials' finances (helping voters, watchdogs, and ethics enforcement) at the cost of greater compliance and implementation burdens, potential privacy/safety risks for officials and their families, and new financial impacts on affected employees and taxpayers.
Voters, taxpayers, journalists, and watchdogs can search, download, and analyze Members' and candidates' financial disclosure and transaction reports via a machine-readable public system (API), making it substantially easier to detect conflicts of interest and inform voting and oversight.
Members of Congress, the President, and the Vice President face clearer, harmonized rules to divest conflicting financial holdings and clearer statutory language, reducing ambiguity and lowering the chance of unresolved conflicts of interest.
Federal employees and covered officials get standardized penalties for missed STOCK Act filings and a required one-year update of supervising ethics offices' rules, which increases accountability and should improve compliance processes and guidance.
Members, covered officials, and their families will have detailed transaction data (ticker, amounts, dates) made public, raising concrete privacy and safety risks for them and potentially exposing personal financial details.
Officials and staff required to divest or comply may incur real financial costs — transaction losses and recurring $500 penalties for missed reports — increasing the personal financial burden on some public servants.
Taxpayers will bear the administrative and technical costs of building and maintaining a searchable, API-enabled public disclosure system, while collected fines are deposited to general Treasury receipts rather than used to fund ethics enforcement or training.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Creates divestment rules for top federal officials, adds a $500 per-instance fine for missed STOCK Act transaction reports, and requires a public, searchable disclosure portal with an API.
Introduced April 28, 2025 by Joshua David Hawley · Last progress April 28, 2025
Requires federal elected officials and certain relatives to divest or otherwise follow updated asset rules, creates a $500 penalty for each missed STOCK Act transaction report, and mandates a public, searchable online portal (with API) for Members of Congress’ and congressional candidates’ financial disclosure and transaction reports. It also makes technical edits across federal ethics and securities statutes and includes a severability clause. Supervising ethics offices must issue rules and update guidance; the $500 fine applies to failures on or after March 31, 2027, and the public online access requirement becomes effective 18 months after enactment.